Effort focused on trees, urban forests
versation about the role urban forests play in making cities healthier for residents, particularly in marginalized communities where there is minimal tree cover and correspondingly high temperatures.
“What we’re really trying to cultivate here is an ethic of reciprocity between people — particularly children, but adults as well — and the urban forest ecosystem, and this is one way to do it during a time where there’s not much else going on,” Scott Kellogg, educational director at the center, said.
Volunteers have bored holes into the bases of maple trees in Arbor Hill and Lincoln Park, as well as at all 11 of the city’s elementary schools where students are participating in the sustainable tapping process and getting a hands-on science lesson out in nature. There are currently around 25 maple trees of different varieties tapped in the city through the program, which is sponsored by the city of Albany and Albany County, Kellogg said. The trees are selected in collaboration with the city forester and are evaluated based on diameter and overall health.
The program was created four years ago and usually begins each year in mid-to-late February, but this year’s unseasonably warm temperatures allowed the center to start tapping trees during the first week of the month, earlier than ever before. For the buckets to fill up with sap, temperatures need to stay above freezing during the day but below freezing at night.
But this season’s unpredictable weather patterns have posed challenges for the state, which is the nation’s second-leading producer of maple syrup behind Vermont. Last week, sap stopped flowing as temperatures rose to record highs. With this week’s return to upstate winter conditions, Kellogg said he’s hopeful the sap flow will restart.
Albany students and volunteers from the center’s Youth Employment Program collect the sap on a weekly basis and bring it to the center at 153 Grand St. where it will be stored until early next month. On March 11, the organization will host a public event where community members can stay warm with cups of boiled sap as organizers cook it into maple syrup. Once finished, jars of the syrup will be distributed to each of the participating classrooms and sold at farmers markets with proceeds supporting the center’s environmental community programs.
“You can tap maple trees year after year using sustainable practices and not cause any lasting harm to the health of the tree, so we want to demonstrate to students that you can engage in this sort of sustainable relationship with trees and with urban forests, and therefore they would hopefully be more motivated to ultimately work in the defense of the protection of trees,” Kellogg said.
Founded in 2009, the Radix Center seeks to find community-based solutions to address environmental issues facing communities historically redlined against investment, such as Albany’s South End. In 2021, the organization launched its Biocultural Diversity Forest Program, setting out on a mission to plant 150 trees to both beautify the neighborhood and create a “food forest” to target a food desert in the community.
The organization is minimizing waste through its Community Compost Initiative, a weekly compost pickup service for Albany residents and businesses, and also offers a farm share program where residents can receive fresh produce grown at the center. This summer, the nonprofit will continue to maintain gardens throughout the city with the goal of connecting neighbors with a local food source, and they also plan to deploy artificial floating islands on the Hudson River for water quality improvement.
All these efforts fall under the same lens of what Kellogg refers to as “urban ecosystem justice.”
It’s about “really looking at the intersection of urban sustainability and social justice and how those things come together, looking at how questions of equity and justice and fairness, race and class, pertain to things like water and energy and trees and soils,” he said.